Awesome Support – WordPress HelpDesk & Support Plugin

Description

Awesome Support is the most versatile and feature-rich support plugin for WordPress. It’s the result of three+ years of work, research, and improvement. The features are an answer to user requests for a premium, WordPress-based help desk. But that’s not the only thing that makes it the best. Its free and premium feature-set coupled with its REST API rivals the best hosted helpdesks – without the large monthly fee!

For premium one-on-one support or pre-sales questions please visit the official site.

What does it do?

Check out the user-friendly features of this awesome plugin:

Ticketing: users can submit tickets from the front-end, and your agents respond to them from the WordPress back-end

E-mail notifications: relevant parties are notified of certain actions by e-mail, and all e-mails are customizable. Choose from a selection of six email notifications (new ticket, reply to agent, reply to client etc.)

Restricted access: all correspondence is private between the client and the agents (unless the PUBLIC TICKETS premium add-on is installed and configured)

File upload: you control when files can be uploaded, how many files, and how large they are

Multiple products: provide support for as many products as you want; synchronize product lists with popular e-commerce platforms such as WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads (EDD)

Multiple departments: provide support for multiple departments

Custom fields: easily set up additional custom fields on your ticket forms (and our premium Custom Fields add-on offers even more convenience). Choose from 13 field types, control where they show up (front-end, back-end, ticket list, ticket form etc.) and decide who can view them.

Terms & conditions: ask users to agree to your your terms and conditions before they open a ticket

Old tickets: identify old tickets quickly with tags; limit your viewable ticket list to only show old tickets with just a couple of clicks

Tickets waiting on you: Quickly see all tickets still waiting for a reply – two clicks is all it takes to limit your ticket list to only those tickets!

Agent Collaboration: multiple agents can work on the same ticket and tickets can be transferred between agents; assign primary, secondary and tertiary agents to tickets while retaining the flexibility to transfer a ticket to any other agent.

Sorting And Filtering: includes an amazing flexible sorting, filtering and tagging system for your tickets

Security: assign just the right capabilities to each of your agents including just the ability to see their own tickets or expand to see everyone’s tickets – your choice!

Prioritize your way: create your own priority scheme – you don’t have to get locked into a 1-5 priority scheme!

Time Tracking: basic time tracking is included! Admins can even adjust time and all time changes are logged directly in the ticket.

Custom status: sign up for our email newsletter and get our Custom Status plugin for free – unlimited color coded, customized statuses and ticket labels at your fingertips! Combined with priorities and tags you have the ultimate system for categorizing and tracking your tickets!

WordPress UI: Uses the familiar WordPress administration user interface so there is almost no learning curve! And, because we respect the WordPress UI standards you can use any 3rd party styling tool to create the look you want (see the screenshots section for examples)

Features

Awesome Support is probably the most powerful helpdesk and support ticketing plugin on the planet. Seriously – just take a look at all the features you can get (some free, some premium)

Unlimited Tickets (Free)

Unlimited Agents (Free)

Unlimited Users (Free)

Unlimited Products (Free)

Unlimited Departments (Free)

Unlimited Tags (Free)

Unlimited Custom Priorities With Color-coding (Free)

Unlimited Channels (Free)

Unlimited Custom Statuses/Labels With Color-coding (Free)

Unlimited Custom Fields (Free)

Private Tickets (Free)

Agents can create tickets on behalf of users (Free)

Agents can view only their tickets or all tickets (Free)

Agents can receive e-mail notifications by email for ticket events such as new ticket, reply to ticket etc. (Free)

Users can receive e-mail notifications by email for ticket events such as new ticket, reply to ticket etc. (Free)

Agents can respond to tickets using email (Premium: E-mail Support add-on)

Users can respond to tickets using email (Premium: E-mail Support add-on)

Options for handling unrecognized email addresses including rejection of email or adding new accounts (Premium: E-mail Support add-on)

Retrieve new tickets from multiple inboxes (Premium: E-mail Support add-on)

Set rules to govern priority, status and default agent assignment based on which inbox a message was received in. Great for VIP clients, product promotions or multiple department ticket handling (Premium: E-mail Support add-on)

Set rules to govern email handling based on the content of emails or who the email is from. (Premium: E-mail Support add-on)

Create custom email commands that can be used via replying to email to close tickets, reassign to agents, escalate priorities etc. (Premium: E-mail Support add-on)

Configure email templates for email notifications (Free)

Automatic round-robin assignment of tickets to agents based on their current ticket load (Free)

Assign tickets to agents based on departments and products (Premium: Smart Agent add-on)

Assign tickets to agents based on working hours (Premium: Smart Agent)

Many more features – just check out our website for a listing of all 25+ add-ons!

Premium Extensions

Now that you’ve seen our list of awesome features above, you already know that Awesome Support is packed with features; so if you want to supercharge your support and make it even more awesome, make sure you pick up our premium add-ons so you can extend the plugin’s functionality even further! All of our add-ons are extremely affordable (they’re a fraction of the cost of a web-based application). To check them out, visit our official site at getawesomesupport.com.

Extensions

E-Mail Piping – reply to tickets and collaborate on tickets using just e-mail. Includes built-in options to control how to handle unrecognized email addresses, responses to closed tickets and much more!

Custom Fields – a visual helper for adding custom fields to your tickets. Add unlimited fields and choose from 13 different field types!

Paid Support – charge users for using your support services. Create subscriptions by time (monthly for example) or number of tickets (10 tickets per month for example) or bill for every individual ticket.

WooCommerce – this is a must-have bridge between your WooCommerce store and Awesome Support

Advanced Time Tracking – Track and record time down to the reply level using automatic or manual timers. Export data for invoicing. View critical time and billing reports.

Auto Close – Close tickets automatically based on defined rules. This is especially useful in managing abandoned tickets.

Private Credentials – Adds another security layer to your tickets so that users can securely enter passwords and other sensitive credentials onto a ticket

Satisfaction Survey – Conduct suveys to see how your agents are performing. Extremely customizable with multiple survey types and methods!

Public Tickets – Use your tickets to create a searchable archive of solutions. Assign public/private control over tickets and replies to customers, agents or both and display public tickets in multiple layouts!

Guest Tickets – Allow new users to enter their first ticket without the separate step of creating an account. Combine this with Email Support, Powerpack and Satisfaction Survey to create a solution where customers never have to log into your ticket system!

Smart Agent Assignment – Have multiple agents with multiple departments and/or multiple products? Use this to automatically route new tickets to the correct agent using a choice of 5 sophisticated algorithms!

Documentation – A powerful documentation add-on that integrates tightly with your Awesome Support ticketing system. Includes a beautiful default layout and automatically suggests relevant topcis as users fill out a new ticket!

Remote Tickets – Adds a pop-up ticket form to one or more remote websites. Quickly and easily funnel tickets from all your websites to one core support site!

Custom FAQ – Use any WordPress custom post type as your FAQ source. Tightly integrates your selected CPT with Awesome Support and uses it to automatically offer topic suggestions to users as they fill out a new ticket form.

Additional extensions such as EDD (integration with Easy Digital Downloads), Envato (Integration with code-canyon/envato) and Filestack (offloads attachments to the cloud) bring even more power to Awesome Support.

Bundles

Purchase one of our bundles and get up to a 70% discount compared to purchasing individual add-ons.

Startup Bundle – A 50% discount on the 5 most common add-ons for unlimited sites

Standard Bundle – A discount of 20%-60% on the 8 most common add-ons (discount level depends on number of site licenses purchased)

Professional Bundle – A discount of 45%-70% on the add-ons most useful for e-commerce sites (discount level depends on number of site licenses purchased)

Enterprise Bundle – A discount of 50%-70% on the most common add-ons used in larger businesses.

Agency Bundle – A discount of 55%-70% on a bundle of almost all our add-ons. You get an even bigger discount if you purchase this package without the option for technical support!

Seamless Integration

Awesome Support was built to be compatible with 99% of all existing themes, both free and commercial. It’s “plug & play” – all settings and templates are automatically switched on as soon as you click the “Activate” button, so you can get started with providing support straight away.

Responsive Design

Awesome Support provides an optimized viewing experience for easy reading and navigation with minimal resizing, panning, and scrolling. Do your clients regularly submit tickets on the go? Awesome Support is responsive, so they’ll enjoy a seamless experience from the convenience of their mobile phone (provided the theme you use is also responsive).

Robust Code

Version 4 of Awesome Support was built with flexibility in mind; the code is clean, well-documented and full of hooks. You can easily customize Awesome Support to do almost anything you want or need.

Awesome Support is built with many reputable open-source projects including the Titan Framework to handle plugin options, [FlexBox Grid] (http://flexboxgrid.com/) for certain styling elements, [BootStrap 4] (http://getbootstrap.com/) for optional themes, [Simple Hint] (http://catc.github.io/simple-hint/) for tool tips and a few others.

Translations

Awesome Support is available in a variety of languages and volunteers and customers are always adding more! Portions of the plugin have been translated into 20+ languages by our users and voluteers. These include German, Portuguese(BR), Arabic, Chinese, French, Italian, Persian, Polish, Spanish, Swedish and more!

Do you want to translate Awesome Support in your language? Head over to the POEditor.com Project! Alternatively you can translate Awesome Support right here on WordPress.org – [Translate Awesome Support on WordPress.org] (https://translate.wordpress.org/projects/wp-plugins/awesome-support/) .

Don’t see your language? Let us know which one you would like and we will add it for you!

Roadmap

Want to know what’s next for Awesome Support? Check out the roadmap. You can also vote for the ideas you like best!

Add-Ons

Need to extend Awesome Support’s features? We have lots of add-ons to help you setup the perfect support site. Check out our add-ons page.

Team

Even though the plugin has been developed and is maintained by the Awesome Support development team, we’ve had help from various developers around the world. You can see all the contributors on the team page. Many thanks to them all!

Our key core developers on the Awesome Support Development Team in the third quarter of 2017 include:

Here is a list of users who volutarily contributed the most translations to our POEDITOR project in 2017:

Miquel Martínez – Catalan

Samer Haddad – Arabic

Paul Hecko – Portuguese

Thiago Rocon Kuwabara – Portuguese

Davey Hurkmans – Dutch

We had over 25 users contribute to the various language projects but these were the top 5 with the most translation activity. On behalf of all our users we would like to publicly offer a heart-felt Thank You for their hard work and contribution to the Free Awesome Support core project!

Screenshots

Agent's view of the tickets list (2016 theme)

Client view of the tickets list (2016 theme)

Client view - ticket details (2016 theme)

Basic settings page without any add-ons

Login and registration screen available as soon as the plugin is activated (2016 theme)

Agent's view when replying to a ticket. Notice the red stripe in the opening post - that header is color coded based on the ticket priority and lets the agent know at a glance that they are working on a high-priority ticket.

A highly minimized view so you can see more areas of a ticket that is available to an agent. Notice the time tracking area at the bottom and the increased number of metaboxes on the right that provide a ton of additional data and functions.

A very stylized version of the agents ticket list (done with CSS or a 3rd party styling plugin - your styling possibilities are endless!)

A very stylized version of a ticket - agent view (done with CSS or a 3rd party styling plugin - imagine the possibilities for creating your own styles that match your brand!)

Client view of the tickets list with a random theme pulled from WordPress.org (colormag theme)

Client view of a ticket detail screen using a random theme pulled from WordPress.org (colormag theme)

Premium Addon: FAQ - agent view while responding to a ticket and selecting an FAQ for the ticket response.

Installation

Using The WordPress Dashboard

Navigate to the ‘Add New’ in the plugins dashboard

Search for ‘Awesome Support’

Click ‘Install Now’

Activate the plugin on the Plugin dashboard

Uploading in WordPress Dashboard

Download awesome-support.zip from this page

Navigate to the ‘Add New’ in the plugins dashboard

Navigate to the ‘Upload’ area

Select awesome-support.zip from your computer

Click ‘Install Now’

Activate the plugin in the Plugin dashboard

Using FTP

Download awesome-support.zip from this page

Extract the awesome-support directory to your computer

Upload the awesome-support directory to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory

Activate the plugin in the Plugin dashboard

Setup

Whatever the method you used, after you activated the plugin through the plugins dashboard, the setup is done silently in the background.

Two new pages will be added to your site:

My Tickets

Submit ticket

Add those two pages to your menu in order to give your users easy access to their support area.

FAQ

Installation Instructions

Using The WordPress Dashboard

Navigate to the ‘Add New’ in the plugins dashboard

Search for ‘Awesome Support’

Click ‘Install Now’

Activate the plugin on the Plugin dashboard

Uploading in WordPress Dashboard

Download awesome-support.zip from this page

Navigate to the ‘Add New’ in the plugins dashboard

Navigate to the ‘Upload’ area

Select awesome-support.zip from your computer

Click ‘Install Now’

Activate the plugin in the Plugin dashboard

Using FTP

Download awesome-support.zip from this page

Extract the awesome-support directory to your computer

Upload the awesome-support directory to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory

Activate the plugin in the Plugin dashboard

Setup

Whatever the method you used, after you activated the plugin through the plugins dashboard, the setup is done silently in the background.

Two new pages will be added to your site:

My Tickets

Submit ticket

Add those two pages to your menu in order to give your users easy access to their support area.

Missing tabs or menu options after version 4.0 upgrade

This happens because new WordPress custom security capabilities were introduced in version 4.0.0 of Awesome Support. [Read this FAQ on our site to learn how adjust your system for these new security items.] (https://getawesomesupport.com/question/missing-tabs-menu-options-version-4-0-upgrade/)

I get a blank page after ticket submission

This is most likely a permalinks issue. What you need to do is log into your WordPress admin, go to Settings > Permalinks and hit the Save button. You don’t actually need to change anything, just hitting Save will refresh your permalinks structure, including the new ticket post type.

The plugin data isn’t removed from the database after uninstall

If you want to delete the plugin and all of its data, you need to go to the Advanced tab in the plugin settings and check the Delete Data option. Only then the data will be removed from the database during the uninstall process.

If your users get the error message “You do not have the capacity to open a new ticket”, it means that they don’t have the special capabilities.

Here you have two choices:

Change all your users’ role to Support User

Give the role you want to use (eg. Subscriber) the special capabilities

If you don’t know how to add new capabilities to a role, we suggest you use a plugin like User Role Manager and give the desired role the following capabilities:

view_ticket

create_ticket

close_ticket

reply_ticket

attach_files

Do not give your users more than those 5 capabilities, otherwise they could get administrative privileges.

How to disable agent auto-assignment

If you need to disable the auto-assignment function and hence have all new tickets assigned to the default agent (set in the plugin general settings), you can add this constant in your theme’s functions.php file:

define( 'WPAS_DISABLE_AUTO_ASSIGN', true );

How to set the product field as mandatory?

If you have enabled multi-products support and want to make the “Product” field in the submission form mandatory, just add the following code snippet to your theme’s functions.php file: https://gist.github.com/julien731/a519956ce9c81542439c

How to change the tickets slug?

By default, all tickets will be accessed through a URL of the type domain.com/ticket/my-ticket-title.

If you wish to change the slug ticket to something else, let’s say help, so that your URLs look like domain.com/help/my-ticket-title, you need to add a constant in your theme’s functions.php file as follows:

define( 'WPAS_SLUG', 'my_new_slug' );

I don’t receive e-mail notifications

There are several factors that can influence e-mail notifications delivery. Please read this article for details: https://getawesomesupport.com/email-notifications-awesome-support-wordpress/

Reviews

We needed a Help desk tool for internal use at our hospital. We needed something that could be highly configurable for multiple departments and yet powerful from a mobile device perspective. Awesome Support lives up to it’s name. Documentation as been AWESOME!

Interested in development?

Changelog

4.3.5

The version 4.0.0 line is a MAJOR upgrade from 3.3.4. If you are upgrading from 3.3.4 or earlier versions it is strongly suggested that you test this upgrade in a stage/test environment before applying it to your production site.
At the very least you should back-up your site before applying this update!

Security Fixes

No security fixes in this release

New

DIVI theme compatibility layer

Fix

WP 4.9 broke the color pickers

4.3.4

Security Fixes

No security fixes in this release

Fix

Remove errant javascript that was being queued in the logfile viewer area of the codebase

Fixed a few more incorrect text-domain references

4.3.3

Security Fixes

No security fixes in this release

Tweak

Welcome page now has new tabs, links to documentation and is generally cleaned up to show more information in a better format.

Replaced a call to mkdir() with wp_mkdir_p() (contributed by lubobill1990)

Set a variable to type array if it’s empty – just in case its empty because an array wasn’t passed into the function (contributed by lubobill1990)

New

Filter added to reply form – wpas_show_reply_form_front_end – can be used to control whether the reply form should be shown on the front-end.

Option to remove rating request in wp-admin footer.

Add new filter wpas_allow_loading – allow loading / not loading of AS – useful to avoid loading AS when traffic received is from a bot.

Add new filter wpas_allow_soft_loading – allow loading / not loading of AS – useful to avoid loading AS when traffic received is from a bot. This one is different from the one above in that it uses a RETURN statement instead of a DIE statement when the filter evaluates to FALSE.

Add new internal function wpas_filter_input_server() that helps to work around a known PHP bug involving INPUT_SERVER and the FILTER_INPUT() function.

Fix

class-logger __destruct was assuming a file name instead of a resource handle when attempting to close a file.

A function in class-logger were attempting to close a file using the filename instead of the file resource handle.

Log files need to be in separate folders when running under multi-site.

Fix: Core taxonomy custom fields were not using the slugs defined in wp-config. This affected the PRODUCTS, DEPT, PRIORITY and CHANNEL fields that are shipped as part of core. It also affected any user defined custom fields as it forced the rewrite slug to be the same as the name.

4.3.2

Security Fixes

Remove log viewer tab in tools submenu if current user is not an admin

(Internal tweak) Do not load the flexboxgrid css script if bootstrap4 scripts are turned on.

Fix

Pricing for certain items on the add-on page was missing (because they deviated from our normal pricing standards).

Minor grammar fix to tools->system status tab.

4.3.1

Improvements

Changed the name of the quick-close and re-open links in the ticketlist because the WP auto-generatd classnames for the link conflicted with Bootstrap 4 classnames (causing some wacky displays!)

Added quick-start instructions at the top of the ABOUT page that is shown when the plugin is activated.

Fix

[urgent]Create and update ticket meta _wpas_last_reply_date and _wpas_last_reply_date_gmt when tickets are opened from wp-admin.

4.3.0

New

New custom field attributes for custom css classes

New custom field attributes for multiple columns using Bootstrap 4 classes (experimental)

Improvements

Improved compatibility with bootstrap 4 (Bootstrap 4 support is STILL experimental)

Fix

[urgent] FAQs, DOCUMENTATION and other add-ons that used the reply-area in wp-admin had their select drop-downs disabled.

4.2.1

Improvements

Additional work was done on automatic upgrade routines 3.x.x to 4.2.x (please consider this experimental and BACKUP your database before upgrading!)

Fix

Fix minor grammar issue on general settings tab.

Notes

4.2.0 was never submitted to the wordpress repo. So the upgrade is from 4.1.0 to 4.2.1, not 4.2.0 but includes all the 4.2.0 improvements and fixes outlined below.

4.2.0

New

Added option to change the batch size used when cleaning up expired sessions

New: Filter added to INIT function in wpas-session class. You can use the new wpas_initiate_session_flag filter to disable creating the session. This would be useful when the traffic is coming from bot sources such as pingdom or uptimerobot.

New: Filter added to the wpas_can_reply_ticket function. The new filter, wpas_can_also_reply_ticket, allows overriding the checks that determines if a user can reply to a ticket.

Improvements

When filtering by ticket id, remove all other filters.

Added options to control which tabs are shown at the top of the TICKET LIST screen.

Disable product filter in ticket list since it doesn’t work (and never worked)

The 3.x to 4.x upgrade routine name was incorrect

Removed unnecessary text from the TITLE of the email template.

Fix: Custom field attribute for Show In Front-end Detail was only working when the show column back end attribute was set to true. It now works regardless of the value of the show column attribute.

4.1.0

New

Added TABS at the top of the ticket list screen to clean up the area. (Depending on your theme this could be a minor breaking change!)

Added new option in the SCREEN OPTIONS tab at the top of the ticket list screen to allow users to open ticket details in a new window/tab when the ID is clicked

(Breaking Change) Added two new custom field options: show_frontend_list and show_frontend_detail. This allows users to control where a custom field will show up on the front end when viewing existing tickets.

Added new filter option for ticket list to show only those tickets waiting for reply

Added two new internal fields on the ticket cpt to store the last reply date and whether the ticket is waiting for a reply or not.

Experimental option to turn on bootstrap 4 styling. Definitely not ready for prime-time but merged in for future use. Or it might be removed.

Experimental support for upgrades as far back as 3.2

Fix

Custom field date types now have a dropdown calendar/datepicker in non-chrome browsers

System report would omit timezone if it was not set to a built-in city

Expired licenses are now shown as expired in the licenses tab instead of having no message at all

Links in ABOUT page fixed to point to new documentation pages on our site.

Improvements

Tweak: Performance improvements on admin pages when there are a large number of products

Tweak: Remove the option to EDIT from the BULK ACTIONS menu when viewing the ticket list. Using it could corrupt the database when multiple taxonomy option items were added to a taxonomy field.

Tweak: Updated the SELECT2 library to version 4.0.3

Tweak: Updated titan framework library EDD plugin Updater to 1.6.4 which fixes a few items including reducing the number of license calls to the add-ons licensing server

(Breaking Change) Tweak: Custom field attribute show_column is now only used to control whether the column shows up on the back-end ticket list. Use the new show_frontend_list and show_frontend_detail attributes to control where and how a column shows up on the front end.

Tweak: Compatibility layer for certain themes that load different versions of the select2 file. We now include the full select2 distribution as an option that can be set in TICKETS->SETTINGS->ADVANCED

Tweak: Improved WPML compatibility (Thanks to David Garcia Watkins from WPML for contributing this improvement on github)

Tweak: Better sorting of the activity column in ticket list.

Tweak: Better performance when sorting the activity list

Tweak: Internal function update to the list of custom post types that qualify as being owned by awesome-support

Tweak: Layouts on very small mobile screens

4.0.6

New

Added infrastructure code to allow the use of TABS in the reply area by add-ons. This means that the never ending size of the reply area is now more manageble since add-ons can now place their UI in a tab.

Improvements

Tweak: Only update CHANNEL in wpas_insert_ticket if channel field is blank. This allows some other filter/action hooks to override the default channel.

Tweak: Modified notifications class so it can be extended.

4.0.5

Improvements

Add some new options to control how attachment links are shown on tickets. Some servers cannot handle our masked attachment links because of mis-configuration so now have option to use unmasked links

Add option to control the contents of the .htaccess file that protect an individual ticket upload folder.

Modifications to email notifications to support new features in the POWERPACK (Productivity) add-on.

Added the ability to optionally view the open date and the close date in GMT format in the activity column.

Added option to show the length of time a ticket was opened in the activity column. Only applies to closed tickets.

Show full date/time for replies when user hovers.

Show time elasped since ticket was open on replies when user hovers.

Changed upgrade routine name to make sure it runs when upgrading from 3.x.

Simplified logic related to when the AWAITING REPLY tag is shown. Before it was shown to agents who were not involved on a ticket even if another agent had already replied to the ticket.

Always show the agent column in the admin ticket list. Before, we would remove that column if an agent who was not an admin was viewing the list.

Bugfixes

php warning was being thrown if product syncing was enabled but user did not click the SAVE button in the PRODUCTS tab on the SETTINGS screen.

4.0.4

New

Add new option under tools menu to delete products that haven’t been used on a ticket.

Add new option under tools menu to view log files stored in the awesome-support/logs folder (experimental).

Add close date under the activity column in the admin ticket list.

Add new options for cookie management under the TICKETS->SETTINGS->ADVANCED TAB

Improvements

Add new filter for front end ticket detail page (wpas_frontend_nav_buttons)

Add filter: wpas_try_login_redirect for successsful logins

Add new function to generate an MD5 hash

Add new option to skip certain validation options when closing a ticket (will be useful for one-click close functions)

Record failures to write .htaccess files (log is located in the awesome-support/logs folder)

Allow adding extra tabs to the tools/system area from plugins/add-ons

Bugfixes

For full product resync under the TOOLS menu option do not delete the existing products in the AS product taxonomy if they are used in tickets already

Verify that a folder is writable before writing a .htaccess file to it.

Check for empty value after calling a function in the stakeholders.php metabox code. Prevents debug.log error from being thrown while still allowing for the proper agent dropdown to be shown on the screen.

Issue with activation on multisite single-blog mode – activation was not completing properly.

Issue with licensing infrastructure for add-ons. Not all licenses would allow for activation after the licensing server software was updated

4.0.3

Bugfixes

Check for the existence of a function before using it in our custom fields class.

Fixed an issue where dropdowns created by our built-in dropdown functions would not return the correct value because of a datatype casting error

Fixed an issue where a warning was being thrown about ‘original post status’.

Improvements

Added option to internal function to use a pre-defined user name when creating a user.

Added two utility functions for generating dropdowns – for later use.

Added new hook into the reply field content when its on the form – hook name is wpas_admin_reply_form_content

4.0.2

Bugfixes

Incorrect error message shown when PHP version is not adequate.

Compatibility shim for sensei plugin – it pukes post ids indiscrimnately on all custom post type pages so we have to disable it on our pages.

Ticket slug settings were not being respected when the ticket was opened in wp-admin.

Applied an explicity INT cast to the time tracking fields when retriving data (just in case they somehow end up with non-numeric data)

Admin ticket list lost the email address for the ticket creator.

4.0.1

Forcing a minor update through to force the svn repo to resync properly.

4.0.0

New

Minimum required version of PHP is now 5.6

Minimum required version of WP is the 4.x line.

Major revamp of sorting and filtering capabilities

More taxonomy fields now work when filtering and sorting

Can enter a ticket number to find a ticket quickly

All other fields can sort or filter

Exception: Product – can only sort on Product not filter (filter will be added in a future version)

Exception: Agent – can only filter on agent; cannot sort by it.

Added a set of fields that will be used for time tracking.

Basic time tracking so agent can set time spent on ticket.

Notes fields

Options to show/not show the fields on the ticket

Options to show/not show the fields in the ticket list on the back end

Options to show the fields disabled on the ticket (used when another plugin is updating the fields)

Added two “Additional Agent” fields. These agents can be notified of ticket events and can see the tickets in their ticket list.

Limitation: There are no email template tags for additional agents to all emails CCed to the additional agents will still reference the primary agent.

You can now set the number of tickets per page that is shown on the front end. The default is still 5. (Some customers had hundreds of tickets for clients based on how they were using the plugin).

Custom fields:

Now have an option to be “backend” only. (Documentation to be updated after release).

Can now be set as “readonly”. (Documentation to be updated after release).

Now have options to control capabilities specific to custom taxonomy fields.

There is now a new explicit field for ticket PRIORITY. You can configure your own priorities and color code them. This field is optional and can be turned on for the front-end, back-end or both and can be made mandatory or optional.

If a priority is set and a color is chosen for the priority then the ticket header will change to reflect that color.

There is a new optional CHANNEL field that allows you to select where a help request originated. The drop-down is pre-configured with a number of common channels such as FACEBOOK and EMAIL. In many instances it will be up to the agent to fill in the field – it is not automatically populated in most cases. But it is automatically populated and set for tickets generated from the standard ticket form, gravity forms and those opened via email.

Added internal fields to store a count of the number of replies on a ticket. This is going to be useful on reports.

Use the button under the TOOLS->SETTINGS->CLEANUP tab to update the fields on older tickets.

Added a set of fields to store “additional interested parties”. These are simply notational fields that do nothing right now but they set the stage for future alerts and notices.

Save the date the ticket was closed in new metafields. Before, the date the ticket was closed was not explicitly saved which made it very hard to use the closing date on reports.

New WordPress Capabilities have been added:

view_all_tickets. This allows non-admin agents to view and update all tickets in the ticket list if the capability is assigned.

view_unassigned_tickets: This allows non-admin agents to view and update unassigned tickets if the capability is assigned.

manage_licenses_for_awesome_support: This allows the license box to be hidden. It is now only shown to admin users by default.

administer_awesome_support: Will be used in future versions and add-ons to limit certain things to Awesome Support admins instead of forcing users to log in with full WP Admin capabilities

Other capabilities specifc to the new pre-installed custom taxonomies.

Add new options for specifying the ticket slug (post id, random number, guid are now options. See TICKETS->Settings->Advanced)

When replying to a ticket you can choose whether to automatically go to the next ticket in the list or the previous ticket in the list (in addition to the prior options of staying in the ticket and going back to the ticket list).

Add ticket id to front end ticket list.

Labels for built-in custom fields can now be retrieved from the OPTIONS array if they exist otherwise default to built-in text values

Add action hooks:

execute_additional_tools to allow add-ons to add their own buttons to the TOOLS->CLEANUP tab.

wpas_show_done_tool_message allow add-ons to show a message after running a tool.

wpas_backend_ticket_stakeholders_before to allow add-ons to access the the stakeholders metabox

wpas_insert_reply_admin_failed to hook into failed replies from the back-end (rare event, should never be needed but added just in case)

wpas_ticket_after_update_admin_success to hook into updates done from the admin screen

wpas_insert_reply_admin_success to hook into replies done from the admin screen

wpas_post_new_ticket_admin to hook into new tickets done from the admin screen

Add filter hooks:

wpas_cf_field_label allows you to change field labels for custom fields

wpas_fe_template_detail_reply_author_avatar allows for the opportunity to change the avatar in the ticket-reply template on the front end

wpas_fe_template_detail_reply_display_name allows for the opportunity to change the display name in the ticket-reply template on the front end

wpas_fe_template_detail_author_avatar allows for the opportunity to change the avatar in the details template on the front end

wpas_fe_template_detail_author_display_name allows for the opportunity to change the display name in the details template on the front end

wpas_dropdown now supports a “multiple” attribute

Politely requests user to rate after 25 closed tickets.

Improvements

Action hook wpas_insert_ticket is now passing an additional parameter containing the original data received before any changes.

Cleaned up Custom Post Type definitions for ticket replies, logs and history so that third party tools can more easily identify them. Prior to this change they all appeared with the name “POSTS” to third party tools which wasn’t very useful.

Checkbox custom field can now be shown on the TICKET LIST screen on the back end.

Some Internal updates to support the add-on infrastructure for certain add-ons.

Functions in functions-email-notifications.php uses a new hook wpas_add_reply_complete so that email notifications now occur AFTER attachments have been processed

A similar hook was added/modified in functions-post.php for the same reason

Added a couple of functions to get tickets belonging to a particular agent

Added hooks in the ticket details metabox to be able to add content before and after the default ticket content

Added processing code for using an ATTACHMENTS tag in email templates

Adjusted the location where custom fields data is updated in the ticket. This is an internal change to ensure that certain alerts have access to the information stored in custom fields.

Updated to allow custom fields to show in the user profile (under very limited and narrow circumstances this is ok but not intended for use by outside developers)

Settings screen changes

New tab for Basic Time Tracking fields

New tab for Products configuration
Uninstall Routine Updates:

Delete ticket attachment folders on the local drives

Uninstall the new taxonomy fields introduced in this version

Change a callback routine in functions-templating.php to handle classes as well as strings.

The USER PROFILE metabox/widget on the ticket detail page now shows the full count of open/closed tickets with or without filters applied. It will now always show the real count regardless of the number of tickets listed underneat the summary.

Show more than 10 add-ons in the ADD-ONs screen

Better sychronization between Custom Status and the TICKETS->SETTINGS->STYLE tab.

To make sync work properly you need to first manually make sure that your color settings in the Tickets->Settings->Style tab matches the ones in Custom Status. Once that is done syncing between core the the add-on will work properly.

When the agent selected “Back to List” for their “after reply” action in their personal profile, this action did not work. Fixed.

Removed the word “PUBLIC” from certain template tags that aren’t really public options

Only activate plugin on single site activation. Network activation on multi-site should do nothing now since there is no specific multisite functionality available.

Removed use of legacy method to check of custom field exists.

Custom fields could not handle multiple checkbox values being stored.

Updated default styles on checkbox and radio button custom fields.

Remove some unused code.

Product Sync Fixes:

Product Sync logic in get_terms was not detecting product taxonomy term id as being synced.

Added back in the ABOUT menu option – it was remove from prior versions.

BREAKING CHANGE: Change a hook with an incorrect name that was used when defining the Deparment taxonomy. Any modifications using the old hook name will need to be updated to use the new name.

Upgrade Instructions

After installing the new version please go to your TICKETS->SETTINGS tabs and click the SAVE CHANGES button to write the defaults for new options to your database.

If it seems that certain options are missing from your TICKETS menu or your TICKETS->SETTINGS screen then please go to TICKETS->TOOLS->CLEANUP and click the button to re-run the 3.3.4 to 4.0.0 upgrade. This will add in any missing WordPress security capabilities to your installation.

Deprecated or Removed

PHP 5.2 and PHP 5.3 no longer supported. Portions of the plugin were not supported by 5.2 for a while now but going forward no testing will be done on PHP 5.2. The minimum supported PHP version is 5.6.3.

Support for the version 3.x line of WP is being deprecated – going forward there will be no more testing or support on these versions.

3.3.4 – December 27th, 2016

New

Added new actions to support attachments processing in the Gravity Forms and Email Piping add-ons

added new class to support attachements processing from add-ons

Improvements

Updated author names in composer.json (github repo)

Updated this readme file to include more relevant and up-to-date information on Awesome Support

Changes to support a better cron option for the e-mail piping add-on

Bugfixes

Plugin would delete its data by default during the un-install process. Fixed to force it to respect the flag in the TICKETS->SETTINGS->Advanced tab.

Fix an incorrect SQL query in the WPAS_MEMBER_QUERY class

Check to make sure that $post is not empty before using it

Standards cleanup in functions-list-table.php

Squashed some bugs related to attachments when tickets are deleted

3.3.3 – October 31, 2016

New

Add templates to e-mail notifiactions

Offer free addon in admin dashboard

Improvements

Improve a number of filters in the e-mail notification class

Update the translation catalog

Bugfixes

Make sure the Sensei fix works at all times

3.3.2 – September 23, 2016

New

Add more hooks and filters

Improvements

Don’t show “Awaiting Reply” tag when agents can see all tickets

Make the “Smart filtering” of tickets an option

Improved capability check on ticket creation

Turn auto-completion of password fields off (for PCI compliance)

Use safe redirects after login & registration (for PCI compliance)

Improve username sanitization on account creation

Add the ability to programmatically add new options through wpas_update_option()